Mike Weiss Gallery

Over the course of two consecutive evenings this past February, Hermann Nitsch executed the first American “Painting Action,” officially the sixtieth such performance since 1960, when he debuted this mode at the Technisches Museum in Vienna. The Painting Actionsthe most recent one includedare not as scandalous as his better-known Actions from the early 1960s, for which he once skinned, mutilated, and crucified a lamb, displaying its body on a wall of white fabric and its entrails on a white table, covered with blood and hot water. Hermann Nitsch 60. Painting Action // 60. Malaktion, 2011, while lacking a lambpresumably the sacrificial lamb of Goddid refer to the Crucifixion, incorporating a number of cross-shaped canvases on which the artist and his assistants had splashed paint, some of it bloodred. White robes and several large-scale canvases were also